Duray Bentley Richards feared police “would stoop to anything” to keep his first-degree murder conviction from returning to court, government records dating back to April 2002 show.

By that time, the inmate of Bowden Institution in Alberta was a decade through his life sentence for the brutal 1992 murder of 21-year-old Carrie Louise Marshall in Creston, B.C., and he had formally applied to access records from his case for the purpose of a late appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada.

Then, on Feb. 18, 2003, a low-ranking RCMP officer took evidence gathered in the Richards investigation to a sawmill in Fruitvale, B.C., and burned it. It was destroyed as part of a routine procedure, Creston police later told B.C.’s Ministry of Attorney General.

Those are among the details laid out in hundreds of pages of legal arguments, police records and court documents that form a last-ditch attempt at freedom by Richards, who has spent 25 years in prison and counting. He has appealed his conviction to the justice minister in a so-called “696.1 submission,” claiming he is innocent of the crime and a victim of a miscarriage of justice who has exhausted all other avenues of appeal.

The Ministry of Attorney General and B.C. RCMP declined to comment, as the matter is under ministerial review.

The case began on Dec. 4, 1992, when Marshall was reported missing from a rural shack where she was temporarily staying just beyond town.

It took three days to find her body.

She had been left several metres into the bush along the side of a quiet logging road, according to documents submitted by Crown counsel in their successful defence at the B.C. Court of Appeal of Richards’s conviction. Pieces of clothing — a blue T-shirt, a pair of pants, a bra and one pink sock — discarded along the road helped lead a search to the crime scene.

Carrie Louise Marshall, who was murdered in 1992 outside Creston, B.C., with her son Brandon.PNG

Marshall was found laying spread-eagled on the ground. Her body was frozen and her face was blue. She was covered in fresh snow and was undressed, save for a single pink sock.

Marshall had no broken fingernails or bruises, lacerations or trauma to her hands or forearms, according to an autopsy report prepared by William Currie, a forensic pathologist who later testified in the case against Richards. Currie found several bruises on Marshall’s face he believed were consistent with punches that could have left her unconscious.

Marshall had several internal injuries and had bled to death, according to Crown prosecutors and Currie, who said the likely murder weapon was a single-arm tire iron.

A second autopsy was performed by Rex Farris, who said there was no question that Marshall’s murder was a sexual assault-related death. She was likely unconscious when the injury that killed her was inflicted, according to court documents.

Local Mounties had one suspect in the case from the start: Richards, then 33 years old and new to town.

They had interviewed him while Marshall was still missing, and they seized his car for inspection the day before she was found dead, according to the submission to the minister. Three days after Marshall was found, he was charged with first-degree murder.

After 74 days of trial and 16 hours of deliberation, Richards was convicted by judge and jury on May 27, 1994, and he was sentenced that day to life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years. He lost at the B.C. Court of Appeal in 1997, and in 2003 the Supreme Court of Canada refused to grant him an extension of time to apply for leave to appeal at that level.

There was no direct evidence that Richards killed Marshall, as Crown counsel stated in court documents. Their case was stitched together like a piece of clothing, with 41 threads of circumstantial evidence, counsel told jurors during trial, according to the submission.

They offered eyewitness testimony that put Richards’s car in the area of the crime, argued he had the opportunity and motive to kill Marshall, and showed physical evidence they said put him at the scene.

Despite the compelling case against Richards, Vancouver lawyer Brock Martland and law students at the University of B.C.’s Innocence Project began looking closer at the conviction several years ago.

Martland said he received some legal aid funding for his work on the case, and he has also put in time pro bono. Jann Arden, the well-known Canadian singer who is also Richards’s sister, contributed several years ago to fees for a private investigator, but she has not put money toward legal fees, Martland said.

In 2016, Martland and the students filed their 267-page submission to the minister claiming that Richards was the victim of a miscarriage of justice.

They reused the Crown’s thread metaphor to carry their argument as to why the conviction should not stand and Richards should be granted a new appeal, or even a new trial.

“A series of threads, stitched together, will give the appearance of a strong and resilient fabric,” they wrote. “But on closer inspection, with only a little tugging on the fabric, the threads unravel. Almost every thread, evaluated individually, is suspect and weak. What is left is far from a reliable and sturdy garment, and it cannot be trusted.”

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